


Let's Play a Drinking Game

by matrixlog



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Asylum, Drinking, F/M, M/M, Mental Illness, Mental Institutions, Panic Attacks, Scars, Self-Harm, Suicide
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-08-25
Updated: 2013-12-08
Packaged: 2017-12-24 13:42:00
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 11
Words: 11,653
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/940646
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/matrixlog/pseuds/matrixlog
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Roxy just wanted everyone (and thing) to shut up and go away. To leave her alone. Dirk wouldn't have that, but it's tumbling so far out of control, that he can't find any way to help her.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

She’d been down to the bottom of every bottle, begging for an escape from the injustices and screamers in her mind. They told her to do it. Told her to make everything better and to fix her problems. That the alcohol could drown out the insults flung at her by the monkeys of hell in her brain. She agreed with them, that the vodka washed down the noise as well as the suicidal feelings and the inability to keep a job, keep a life. Keep her furniture. 

Roxy hit the ground, ass landing on the hardwood and the bottle was still in her hand, liquid sloshing over her fingers. Such a waste and she scrambled to lick it off, letting out little sounds of desperation. Such filthy sounds, that loud one in her head yelled at her. Threat. That was his name. It made no sense as a name, but there were things Roxy understood.

In that little fucked up brain of hers.

“Shut up!” she begged, eyes shutting and her free hand tore at her face, finger nails scraping down the skin on the left side of her head. Blood dribbled down her chin and she forced herself to drink. Drink and drink until the world would fade and she could sit and breathe just a bit. Just a little bit without the screaming and the bullying.

There were things Roxy couldn’t stand in life, and hearing them was one of them. Being surrounded by people was another. But that was a story for a different day, and for now, all she could do was slam back the vodka, drowning out everything, and she curled on her back, the bottle held between her lips as she rocked side to side and swallowed the drops of silence that hit her tongue. She didn’t even taste it and her throat was on fire.  
This seemed to be a typical occurrence.

But she was running out of life in a bottle. And that needed to be remedied this instance. Her fountain of silence was not exactly self-replenishing, and the shit got expensive after a while. Roxy had stolen before, and that was why her stockpile was as full as it was.

Roxy was on her feet, the sole of them slapping the wood to make it towards her kitchen, stumbling into the archway that separated her living room and the frozen tile of her mediocre cooking space. The wood dug into her shoulder, and she fell back, the empty bottle breaking as it made contact with the ground. The glass splattered the area around her, digging into Roxy’s palm and the bare thigh it was closest to, the alcohol soaked glass stinging, and Roxy nearly screamed, biting her tongue as laughter filtered through the blur of a numbed mind. 

The sound was monstrous, like Dracula paired with Godzilla, echoing through her apartment, suffocating her as she laid there for a moment, tears breaching the aqueducts of her eyes, and the first sob of the night broke through her lips, hands clawing at her scalp to gouge out the demon in her head and make it stop. Why couldn’t it just stop? 

They were blaring inside her skull, clawing at the inside of her scalp and their talons were scraping away the armor to protect her brain from serious injury. The laughter, that heinous laughter, had no intention of stopping and would continue on until she drank until her body couldn’t handle the amount of alcohol in her blood system. 

“Shut up,” she moaned, pressing her head in between her knees, wrapping her arms around her legs and rocking back and forth. Her balance flickered and she faltered, getting knocked to the ground by her own drunken behavior. 

Her body smacked into glass, grinding into her fleshy upper arm, and she did scream, though the sound was a moan, groan, utter exclamation of pain and agony. Blood was falling out like the tide gushing against the shore of glass and hardwood. Another drink was needed to calm this moment – she wasn’t supposed to hurt herself. That was all their doing. Their actions and their hatred of herself. Roxy wouldn’t do this on her own free will, she wouldn’t drink like this…would she?

Roxy had no idea. And there was a banging. A banging coming from somewhere in the apartment, or was it in her head? She had no idea and it needed to be quiet. Everything needed to silence. An aftereffect of a concert, where everyone was gone and the arena sat empty. Empty and forgotten. She needed that.  
But the banging wouldn’t stop, and Roxy was still crying. 

“Go away!” she cried, wrapped her exposed arm over her head, blocking one ear and covering her eyes, blocking out the dim light of the only lamp on inside the kitchen, barely pouring out, barely lighting the corners, and the shadows danced over the walls, arms grasping for her, flinging themselves about to reach at her, and Roxy was shaking, begging for this to be over.

However, her wishes weren’t granted, no genie waited for her inside the only lamp on. There wasn’t a magical fairy that would fix her problems. The door smacked open and the wind and rain poured in through the door, but she didn’t see that as she hid herself from seeing the person knocking open her door.


	2. Chapter 2

Dirk Strider flew across the living space, the door slamming shut behind him as he entered. He knelt down next to Roxy, hand on her shoulder. 

“Roxy,” he said, voice firm, and he shook her, only causing the female blond to scream again, jerking to get out of his reach only to throw herself into more glass. 

“Rox!” The second time was far more firm, and he scooped the girl into his arms, blood staining his hands and Roxy was still fighting, desperate to get away from this. 

“Open your eyes,” he begged, not sure if he should even remove his shades to force her to look at something distracting. Something that would get her to stop this manic desperation. She was wailing and clawing at his arms, and glass protruded from all over her body, and Dirk had no idea how to fix her up other than to get her to – “Calm down.”

“Let go of me,” Roxy snapped, pushing against Dirk’s chest to be able to land back on the ground, and she did open her eyes, only to see the shadows dancing around the walls, hands – hands that didn’t look like hands but tree branches or lion’s paws – reaching for her, and she screamed, slamming into Dirk, hiding her bleeding face against the shirt he was wearing. “Make it stop.”

“Hey, hey, it’s okay,” he whispered, stroking her hair that was getting matted by blood. He really needed to take care of this mess, this poor friend of his. He’d only managed to show up by chance, wanting to offer her tickets to a concert he was going to in a week in the next town over, but when she hadn’t responded to his texts, he felt the need to check on his alcoholic friend.

“Nothing can hurt you,” he soothed, getting to his feet and pulling Roxy up with him. She was slouched into his body, not supporting herself, and he picked her up, hands under her as her legs wound around his waist. 

“it’s okay,” he promised, taking her towards the bathroom where he could clean her up. Dirk had spent enough time here to know where the first aid kit was tucked away. It seemed one of the things that never disappeared from her home. “It’s okay.”

Dirk placed Roxy down on the toilet, knocking down the lid before lowering her into place. She still wouldn’t open her eyes but he pulled out the first aid kit, whispering little words of peace, knocking the light on as he did so.

“Do you want me to close the door?” he asked, hand on the doorknob.

“Um…okay,” Roxy mumbled, tucking her head down towards her chest and wrapping her arms around herself. Her speech was so slurred, it was almost difficult to make her words out, but Dirk could. Thankfully.

Dirk shut the door, and knelt in front of Roxy, pulling out tweezers to pluck the glass out of her thigh. She wasn’t dressed right, just in her underwear and an oversized t-shirt that hung loose and low off her body. 

“This will probably hurt,” he warned, placing a hand on Roxy’s thigh to keep it in place and to stop her from jerking before he was able to remove the glass. And Roxy did flinch, jerk, when he pulled out the shard from her leg, biting her lip and bending over to absorb the pain.

“Please…please stop,” she begged, even though it was just one piece of glass. “I need to drink.”

“Ro, you’re fine,” Dirk tried to persuade, brushing through her hair and wiping the tears off with his thumb. “You don’t need to drink.”

“Yes I do,” she wailed, pulling back out of his reach.

Dirk sighed, shaking his head.

“Let me clean you up, and I’ll get you something,” he promised, though he really didn’t want to give her anything else to drink. She was already so drunk and it wasn’t in anyone’s best interest to allow her more alcohol. Maybe he could pass her a bottle of beer and let that be the end of it for tonight.

“Okay,” Roxy muttered after the longest moment of silence. 

And so that’s how they spent the next half hour. Dirk yanked out the glass and covered up the gaping holes, noticing scars and patches of skin that looked completing wrong on her. Scar tissue seemed to coat her legs, but not as if from a cut or scratch, but burn marks and gaps that probably came from more glass that had lodged itself into skin that once seemed so pretty and smooth.

Roxy was growing mute as Dirk continued to clean her up, and she wasn’t flinching the same way. Towards the end, he didn’t even notice if she moved or not. But once he had her body cleaned up, leaving just her hair still bloody, she looked up, as if a doll waking from its slumber, and reached for his hand. Dirk let her grasp it and he pulled her towards him. 

“We need to clean your hair,” he informed her. “Can I put your head under the shower?”

“Yeah,” Roxy mumbled, nodding just slightly. 

“Alright, well, come here,” Dirk offered, pulling her to her feet, but she stumbled over, landing on her knees, hands catching the edge of the tub to stop her head from smacking down hard. Dirk had tried to grab her, to stop her fall, but it hadn’t worked to the best of his ability, and she still cried out in pain as he himself hit his knees to land next to her. 

“I’m sorry.”

Roxy didn’t move, but kept herself bent over, looking slightly green. 

“Hey,” he whispered, pulling her into his chest and rubbing tiny circles in her back to try to calm her. “It’s okay. I’m sorry that happened. Do you want to go to bed?”

“Yeah,” Roxy answered, reaching forward to turn on the water. There was a roar as the pipes spat out the water, hot spray doused Dirk’s hand as he moved to find the cold water to even out the temperature. 

“We’re just gonna wash out the blood, and then I’ll get you into bed,” Dirk assured, taking her head and putting it gently under the stream of water. He cupped the liquid, dumping it onto her head and scrubbing gently to remove the tangles and blood that were making a home in her hair. He used a decent amount of shampoo to really get it cleaned up, trying not to get Roxy’s bandages wet or to drown her in the process. A few times, she grabbed his pant leg, and he stopped while she coughed until he was able to continue cleaning her.

Dirk reached for the conditioner to get her hair as soft and shiny as it always seemed, but Roxy reached for his hand, stopping him. He looked down at her and she was looking up through soaking bangs that gave her a ragged appearance, and Dirk nodded, reading the begging look of no on her face easily, putting the bottle back down on the shelf. 

“Let me just make sure it’s all out and I’ll put you to bed,” Dirk said, tucking her head down under the stream of water and getting out the shampoo, running his hands through the hair, combing it as gently as he could before allowing Roxy to sit back up, turning off the water. 

Roxy shook her head, spraying water everywhere, and Dirk let out a restrained laugh, causing Roxy to give a drunk sprout of nonsense laughter that made Dirk fight the urge to pull back, but instead he got a towel and started to dry her hair, and she shut her eyes again, the green tint to her skin falling down. That was better, and Dirk sighed in relief.


	3. Chapter 3

When he was finished, Roxy’s hair was fluffy and didn’t have the usual flip that she displayed whenever she went anywhere or he came over. Same with Jane or Jake coming over. She always cleaned herself up and looked so normal. 

For them.

Dirk got to see this drunken side of her, when she would flirt with him shamelessly, but it wasn’t a bother.

“Come on,” he said, picking her up bridal style, Roxy tucking her head against her shoulder. “Time for bed, Roxy.”

“Okay,” she muttered, wrapping her arms around Dirk’s neck. “Please don’t leave.”

“I won’t,” he promised, already stepping into her bedroom. It was more bare than it was the last time he was here, with just her bed and her clothes tucked into boxes where they weren’t scattered on the floor. More empty vodka, tequila, and rum bottles littered the stained floor, and suddenly Roxy was clawing at him again, trying to get out of the room, and Dirk had to practically drop her onto the bed where she was shaking and staring at one of the corners with wide, fearful eyes.

Dirk followed her gaze, but there was nothing there other than a shadow due to lack of light. She was so afraid, and he had no idea why. No idea what was going on or what was causing her to drink until she passed out or had her thighs covered in the worst of scars. 

“I’ll turn the light on. Don’t worry, it’s okay.”

He turned back towards the doorway, flipping the switch, and the room was flooded with fluorescent light, turning everything yellow. 

“Is that better?” he asked, coming back to the bed and sitting on the edge.

“Yeah. You didn’t have to clean me up.”

“Yeah I did,” he soothed, rubbing the pad of his thumb over her cheekbone. She leaned into his touch and Dirk kicked off his shoes before getting into bed with her. 

He wanted to talk to her in the morning, about that concert, getting her away from this shitty apartment and seeing if he could crack why she drank so much. She didn’t need to. 

“Well…thank you,” she said softly, laying down and bringing Dirk with her. He reached down, pulling the threadbare blanket over them, up to their shoulders. Roxy only had one pillow, and they each took a side of it, faces tilted towards each other. 

“You’re welcome,” Dirk said, still rubbing the side of her face that she seemed to enjoy. Anything to calm her down right now. 

Roxy’s hand slid over Dirk’s waist, and she pulled herself closer, crushing her front against his.

“Your jeans are annoying,” she stated and giggled slightly.

“No one said you had to cuddle me,” Dirk replied, grinning. He could take them off, but was that considered awkward? Well, he wiggled out of bed, out of Roxy’s grasp and rolling his eyes at her pout before sliding the jeans off his body, thankful Roxy wasn’t watching, as she seemed to be staring at that corner again, as if making sure nothing was going to be attacking her. At least she didn’t have a closet. That would probably make things worse, but once his jeans were off, Dirk slid back under the blanket, and Roxy tucked herself into the contours of his body as he pulled the shades off his face.

“You’re the best friend I could ask for,” Roxy informed him, head tucked under his and he pulled her as close as he could, rubbing her back. 

“Don’t mention it,” Dirk replied, yawning a bit. That storm had been exhausting to drive through, but fixing up Roxy was the world’s largest chore. Though that sounded wrong. He didn’t mind doing it, but there was a lot involved.

He just wanted to fix his friend that seemed to be fixing everyone else until nightfall came or stormy weather. Then she seemed to vanish from the earth for a while. 

But for now, with Dirk holding her, there was no way Roxy could disappear without his consent, and he ran a hand through her hair as Roxy’s breathing evened out, the drunken one falling asleep. Her hangover would be terrible in the morning, and he’d need to make her some coffee when he could, but for now, he just needed to make sure she was okay and that the wounds would heal up in a decent fashion.


	4. Chapter 4

Roxy woke up in the morning with a start, not understanding the constraints that kept her in place, unable to fall out of bed, or at least away from where she had been. Although they started to make sense when she realized Dirk was still there, had been holding her the entire time they slept, and the sun filtering in through the blinds, not anywhere near as bright as usual due to the overhead light still on, indicated they had slept for a long time.

“Ugh, what time is it?” Dirk groaned, and Roxy looked back down at him to see him rubbing his oddly colored eyes and blinking against the amount of light so early in their awakening.

“I don’t know,” Roxy replied, sitting up and wishing she hadn’t. Her head swam inside an option of pure pain, and her stomach flopped over inside its lining, almost pushing up the liquid she’d been drinking, the lack of food from the last few days. “Fuck, I shouldn’t have done that.”

“Do you need the restroom?” Dirk asked, sitting up as well and putting a hand in the middle of her back.

“Maybe,” Roxy replied, eyes shut, face in her hands to try to block out the pounding of the light and the screaming of the cars outside. As well as dealing with the fog of murmurs clouding her brain, drifting in and out of focus. The occasional strong word slipped into focus every now and again and she fought the urge to flinch. Dirk didn’t need to know.

“It’s okay to throw up,” he urged, rubbing her back, feeling the sudden light moments that radiated from her spine.

“I’m fine,” Roxy lied, though she felt like tossing everything from her body.

“Well…I’ll make some coffee. How do eggs and bacon sound?” Dirk asked.

“Like misery.”

God, the idea of eating just made her feel the vomit rising her throat, and she swallowed it back down, to keep from causing further stains on her nasty bedroom floor.

“Sorry,” Dirk muttered, getting up and moving around to help Roxy out of bed. He started urging her along towards the kitchen, feeling like a herding dog. “But I will brew some coffee, okay?”

Roxy nodded, and then groaned. Her brain was swishing around inside her skull, slamming itself against the bone, creaking, aching, screaming. There was always so much screaming in her head, and hearing the thoughts flicker in and out, their voices yelling, howling, murdering her ears…Roxy thought she was going to throw up, and stopped in her tracks, stomach heaving. 

Nothing came out, and Dirk tugged her along after a minute, into the kitchen where he picked her up and sat her down on one of the spare counters, keeping the lights off and pulling the blinds shut. A cabinet was open, and looking inside he saw her alcohol collection, something that never seemed to waver, and he pushed the door shut.

“Where’s your coffee maker?” he asked, tugging at his boxer briefs to keep them lower on his thighs. 

“Pantry. Only thing in there.”

She watched Dirk, eyes half opened, as he went about the preparations for coffee. A steaming hot cup of black coffee washing down the bile in her throat sounded amazing, but there was a stench in the air that occasionally, made her stomach groan, and she’d lean over the sink, only to sit there and dry heave like an idiot for the faintest of moments.  
Eventually, Dirk picked her back up, putting her down in the living room, and while he was gone, only to grab the coffee, Roxy had forced herself into the corner of the couch, eyes twitching around the room, the voices getting louder, screaming inside her head and yelling, yelling yelling until she wound up pressing hands against her ears, shaking and rocking, eyes squeezed shut against the maniacs in the room.

“Roxy?”

The world shattered, came back into focus as her eyes snapped open to see Dirk standing alone in the room with two cups of coffee in his hands. The steam curled up and up and up, towards his face and over his hair, dancing with the mess on top of his head before drifting into oblivion at the ceiling. 

“Sorry,” she mumbled and blinked a few times, reaching out for the coffee cup and bringing the liquid to her lips. It was bitter and burning, blasting into her mouth and dousing her tongue before heating up her insides as it tumbled into her stomach.

“It’s okay,” Dirk assured, sitting down next to her, and the woman spread out her long legs over his lap, Dirk’s free hand rest just above her knee. “There was something I wanted to talk to you about.”

“Yeah?”

“I have two tickets to a concert next weekend, and it’s out of town,” Dirk started, drinking his own coffee that had been diluted with milk and sugar. “And I think it’d be good for you to get out of town for a while, out of this place. And normally I wouldn’t leave until the day of the concert, but I think we should leave today. If you want to go that is.”

Roxy was a little taken aback. No one offered to do anything with her other than out to dinner where she could still drink way too much. The others would leave and she’d resettle herself at the bar until they forced her to get a cab to go home. Almost every bartender in town knew Roxy, and almost every restaurant, bar, and club had her address written down somewhere.

But…the concert sounded terrifying. All the noise, and the people, clustered around her where she couldn’t breathe, and her heart clenched in her chest, an icy hand spreading its frozen fear through her veins and she took more coffee into her mouth, trying to warm up the core of her body and maybe her extremities. Or at least lukewarm. 

Then again, a week with Dirk sounded pleasant, and she was willing to do that, maybe fake being sick the night of the concert, offer to pay him back for her ticket (with money she didn’t have), and get drunk in the hotel bar while he went and had fun, listening to a band she’d never heard of.  
“Okay,” she agreed at last. “I can do that. Your truck or my car?”

“We’ll take my truck,” he replied, a grin spreading over Dirk’s face. He patted Roxy’s thigh lightly, and finished up his coffee. 

“Alright.” The corners of Roxy’s mouth were being tugged at, invisible strings will the muscles of her mouth to curve up and give Dirk a smile. She could easily get out of being at that concert, find a way to make it up to Dirk. Sex was a way to repay someone, right?


	5. Chapter 5

The ride went silent, until the sun began to set, and Roxy’s skin began to crawl. The trees were turning to monsters, with dead bodies hanging from the limbs. Their limbs waved in the breeze, and Dirk hummed along with the song on the radio. One of the hands lifted, waving to her, and the dead man’s eyes opened, only to reveal nothing.

“Shit!” Roxy screamed, throwing herself away from the window, face pressed against Dirk’s thigh as the conjoined seat belt and its holster stabbed into her hip, digging into flesh and feeling like it was ripping apart the skin. 

“Fuck!” Dirk shouted two barely discernible moments after Roxy had thrown herself onto him, and he slammed on the breaks, swerving to stop in the center of the highway. Thankfully, they were alone on the stretch of road, and his heart needed to calm down in its chest.

Once it did, he shook his head and petted Roxy’s hair, feeling her shaking violently through his clothes, through his hand.

“Shh, baby, it’s okay,” he soothed, and got the truck back on path.

“Baby?” Roxy asked, looking up at him, eyes wide with both surprise at that word and from fear of what she’d just seen. Her head was pounding, both from the hangover that was still present from that morning and from the rumble of voices that were taking megaphones to make themselves heard and lining them around her ear drums.

“Yeah, it just slipped out,” Dirk said, which seemed mostly true, and Roxy hid her face again, wrapping her hands around her ears, curling her fingers so the tips of her ears pressed down and over the hole leading to her skull. “I won’t call you that if you don’t want me to.”

“Oh, sorry.” Her voice was muffled against his denim-clad legs. “You can call me what you want.”

Dirk shook his head, smirking lightly. Yeah, that was such a Roxy answer.

“I’ll just call you whatever slips out of my mouth then,” he answered.

_As long as it isn’t crazy or crackpot._

**Oh, but you are.**

That was Threat.

No it wasn’t. 

That was someone else that she had never named but they were similar. Shit shit shit. She was developing another voice and Roxy found the button to release the seat belt and she curled up, trying to be as small as possible as she pressed herself against Dirk, nearly sobbing as this new voice started a speech, a raving rant, about how she was so insane.

“Hey, shit, we’re almost there,” Dirk promised. And they were. The truck was rolling into the city limits, and the hotel he had booked was five more minutes from there. “And when we get there I’ll make everything better. I promise.”

“How can you do that?” she asked, voice trembling dangerously towards an edge that bordered between screaming and barely there sanity.

“There’s more than one way to distract someone,” Dirk said, rubbing her shoulder as he took the exit that led down the path to their hotel. “And…there is a bar, but I’d really like it if you tried to not go. Just for one night.”

More than one way to distract someone? Well, Roxy was all ears, but then again her ears were currently occupied by the nonsense and debauchery going on in her skull. But Roxy was currently more concerned with that and she wasn’t hearing Dirk that well, only having words filter through the noise-ocean occasionally. And he kept speaking (she could hear the rumble going through his legs and where her back was pressed against his hip and part of his stomach, but Roxy wasn’t hearing any of it.

And then the truck was stopping and Dirk was parking, opening the door and swinging his legs out and over the side.

“Hey, come on,” he urged, holding his arms out for Roxy.

Roxy blinked, pushing herself up with her arms and moving to Dirk who lifted her out of the truck and set her on the ground. He reached into the bed of the truck, pulling out their suitcases, and Roxy took the handle of hers from him, staring at the ground to avoid looking at the people and the non-people that struck the edges of her vision. Her stomach was reeling with the need to take a drink, and since Dirk had been with her while she packed, she didn’t have a single thing to drink.

“Dirk.” Her voice was soft, nearly lost to the ground, but Dirk put a hand on her shoulder, and she looked up at him, and there was something behind him and she flinched, pulling back, knocking her frame into the truck’s door. Dirk spun around, searching for what Roxy saw, seeing nothing.

“Come on.” His voice was strained, and he took her hand, pulling her along to the sliding glass doors of the hotel’s lobby, swallowing them into a warm, well-lit and interior designer decorated room done in soothing shades and with plush furniture placed in appropriate areas.

Dirk continued to lead her to the front desk where he checked in, Roxy standing behind him the entire time, hand still held in his, her eyes locked on the bar she could see through a dimly lit doorway. Patrons filtered in and out, dressed nicely. Women’s backs were exposed and men looked damn dapper in their slacks, dress shirts, vests and jackets.

“Can we go?” she whispered to Dirk, tugging on the back of his shirt.

“Hmm?” he asked over his shoulder, taking the key cards from the receptionist. He followed her gaze, the fixated, attracted gaze, that she held on the bar’s door. “No, Ro. We aren’t going.”

Dirk tugged her along this time, to the elevators, where they slid into it, and Dirk pressed the number for their floor. Seven, Roxy noted. 

She didn’t like that number. That’s what age she was when Threat showed up.

Just thinking his name caused the voice to show up, smacking her in the skull with a pick axe, grinding in his insults, stepping on the bones of her self-esteem. 

“What’s that…other distraction?” she asked Dirk, trying to suppress Threat’s actions to her mind.

Dirk smirked for a second, fingers tracing over Roxy’s jawline, down the base of her throat. His face was so near, and had he always had such a distinguished facial structure? Shit, if he had, she’d really been missing something, but even that thought was washed down as Dirk’s lips pressed against her dry ones, sweet at first, and as his body drew nearer, forcing Roxy’s head to tilt up to not break the kiss, it became needy, wanting, yearning for the next phase. 

His hand crept to fit behind her head, holding her as close to him as possible, and Roxy roped her hands behind his back, trying her best to deepen the kiss with him. 

But he had to pull away when the elevator’s doors opened, and Roxy stared at Dirk once his lips had departed Train Roxy. They made eye contact, and she couldn’t believe he had just done that.

“Damn,” she whispered and he chuckled.

“I told you,” he said with a wink and they made their exit, Dirk still holding her hand, as they walked down the hall, suitcases rolling behind them, slipping along the smooth carpet, not a thread catching in their wheels.

“Yeah you did,” Roxy replied, chuckling, catching sight of herself in a mirror and flinching into Dirk.

“What?” he asked, stopping and looking around. Then he saw the mirror, saw what Roxy saw, and rubbed the back of her hand with his thumb. “Shh, it’s okay. It’s just lying to you.”

Roxy blinked hard and rubbed her eyes with one hand before Dirk was tugging her along, but her face stuck in her mind’s eye. Face hollow and the skin taking on a yellow tint, pulled tight over the structure of her bones. Her eyes hid in the shadows she hated, dark purple moons cupping the underside. There was a crack in her lower lip, straight through the middle, and she couldn’t remember when that had ever occurred. But it was there.

And Dirk was wrong. That mirror wasn’t lying to her. It was telling her a truth that she hadn’t heard before. Her lower lip trembled, thinking about the monster she had seen, the freak she had become while keeping to herself and drinking till she passed out. How was she not a bloated whale, covered in even more scars? 

“Roxy.” Dirk’s voice was interrupting her mental analysis of how terrible she looked, how vile she’d become. 

“What?” she asked, responding to him a few moments too late only to realize they were already in their hotel room, and she had no idea what the room number was, only that they were on the seventh floor and Dirk had kissed her while they rode the elevator up.

“Still want me to distract you?”

This was when she realized Dirk was shirtless, and she was backed against a wall, his hands on her hips.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yeah, practically this entire chapter is smut. If that's not your boat-floater, skip this.

“Yeah,” Roxy breathed, not able to meet his glance due to the total distraction of a well-polished chest. She’d seen Dirk shirtless before, like that one time they all went to the beach, and he and Jake had played volleyball while she and Jane rolled their eyes at how competitive they got. She didn’t remember much after that – she was too drunk.

“I won’t hurt you,” Dirk promised, leaning in even closer to where his breath was cat whiskers, tickling the skin of her cheeks, and she could smell the root beer on his tongue, the candy bar he had munched on their way over, the faint hint of chocolate and caramel still between his teeth.

Roxy took the initiative this time, closing the distance between their lips. This one was different than the elevator first kiss. It was softer, sweeter, and probably because she had launched this one, but Dirk seemed to take over between them, and a hand landed next to her head, pushing itself against the wall as he pulled back her lower lip with his teeth, released, and returned to the session that was growing wetter with saliva by the second.

Synchronized swimming could be redirected as synchronized kissing, something that developed in a perfect order, filled with teamwork, as the two stood there, hands roaming over each other as they explored new pieces of their bodies that they hadn’t felt before. Dirk’s hands found soft skin stretched taunt over bones, and Roxy’s found developed muscle and smooth skin without scarring like hers from the glass and the burns and whatever else the monsters had commanded her to do.

With Dirk’s hands already crawling up her stomach, over her ribs, Roxy made the effort of pulling her shirt up and over her head, breaking the lock of their lips only for the briefest of moments before diving back in. The breeze of air conditioning brushed over her skin, painting her with goose bumps and shivers.

“Let’s get you warmed up,” Dirk chuckled, wrapping his hands under her rear, lifting her from the ground with ease, and Roxy twined her legs around his waist, allowing him to carry her over to the bed, pulling back covers easily with one arm and laying Roxy on the bed with gentle ease. But when his lips returned, there was nothing gentle about him.

And Roxy couldn’t complain.

Her mouth parted, and so did Dirk’s. A tongue crept into a mouth, meeting the other there and a battle commenced. The battle was fought in the name of discovery, learning the contours and chips of teeth, the taste of the other and the exchange of DNA in the form of spit.

Roxy, with her back against the mattress, was still cold, and her hand grabbed for the blanket to pull over Dirk’s back, doing her best to keep up with him, to keep pleasing him, to please herself for that matter.

Dirk assisted in the desire of warmth, pulling his tongue back to lick her lower lip, and he pulled back, and Roxy was confused, breathing hard.

“You’re bleeding,” he stated, using his thumb to wipe the blood coming from the crack in the center.

“You’re the one that bit me,” she reminded him, crossing her arms over her bare chest.

“True,” Dirk replied, using his hands to move her arms out of his way and lower his head to kiss down her neck, sucking and nibbling at the flesh as he went, pausing long enough to make sure to leave a growing red welt against the base of her neck, where the body conjoined with the shoulder.

Roxy let out little moans and gasps of pleasure, one hand going through his hair, and the other curling around the sheets on the bed as Dirk’s left hand traveled down her chest, gripping the fat-globs of breast to knead at it, pinch and twist the nipple. Roxy’s back arched, pushing her chest forward and leaving her neck further exposed for Dirk’s sucking lips.

His lips traveled down, meandering to the breast he wasn’t playing with, and he bit. Hard around the nipple, and Roxy nearly shrieked, that was so unexpected, but so distracting, and her eyes fell shut. She barely registered Dirk unbuttoning her jeans and thumbs hooking around her underwear, pushing them down and out of the way, leaving her fully exposed for him.

But she did have a tad bit left of her demented mind to realize that this was occurring and she started to tug at Dirk’s own pants, insisting they were off around the moments she would stop and grip Dirk’s back due to the pleasure-pain. She couldn’t decide which felt more relevant, but Dirk chuckled around her tit and helped get his pants out of the way.

“Fuck,” Roxy cried as Dirk switched his hand and mouth to be on the opposite globe they had been on.

“You sure you’re okay with this?” Dirk asked, looking up at her.

“Shut up and kiss me,” she ordered, pulling his head back to hers so she could make sure that happened just as she wanted. This time she bit around his lips, and she could taste the blood that dribbled into her mouth, but it didn’t detract from an ounce of the pleasure in the moment.

After a bit, Dirk lowered his hand away from her breast, down her stomach and slipped between the folds of her lower lips, sliding along the folds below, hitting her clit every now and again, just to get a moan out of Roxy. She wasn’t used to this amount of attention, and she would whine every time Dirk acted as though he would pull away from below.

Dirk pulled his head back, and his lips were painted the red of blood from the crack on his mouth. And he just watched her, the way her eyes were barely open, and the air pushed out of her mouth, the moans escaped, dancing through the air and into his ears, burrowing into his brain.

“Fuck,” she groaned, legs twitching half-shut when his finger slipped inside the folds, but Dirk’s other hand pushed back one and then the other, muscle straining to keep them in place. She needed something to do other than have explosive feelings radiating up through her.

His finger soon doubled, and she could hear the little schquick of bodily fluids rubbing against skin, but fuck if that didn’t feel good, nothing else did (exception: drinking her ass off).

Roxy pulled Dirk back to her, finding it her turn to bite and suck and nibble on flesh around the neck, near the shoulder. Dirk finally let out his own moan, and she felt so accomplished, as if she was doing something pleasing and correct.

But then Dirk’s fingers were leaving her and she pulled back from his neck, only to realize he had something else to be placed inside the cave between her legs, and she nodded in the slightest of movements, only for Dirk to lean back down, kissing against her lips, her neck, anything he could get his mouth on as he inched his hips forward.

Roxy gasped a bit, her hips rising to meet his, and Dirk moaned, his breath hot and heavy in her ear. Dirk was slower, gentler, than she would have imagined after the sharing of hickeys and the breaking of the skin on her lip, but it wasn’t all bad, and Dirk returned to her lips, nibbling ever so softly, tugging lightly on her lower lip, and she sucked his upper lip into her mouth, letting her teeth grind on that.

Lower, Dirk’s hips picked up with the way their pieholes worked, faster, harder, and he groaned again, and Roxy let out some sort of similar sound. Though where Dirk’s was low and long, Roxy’s were short and sweet, as if to the point.

Not that there was a point, and her mind was too hazed over to be able to even hear the murmurs caressing her brainwaves, licking over the tissue to taste the fluids, but Roxy was (for the moment) immune, as the distraction was one so different than the tolerance she had built up.

Maybe immune was the wrong word.

Every so often, like the wind skirting against the windows, there’d be a whisper, somewhere behind Dirk, and her eyes would roll towards it, but nothing would scramble in or out of her eyesight. Nothing was there at all, and her fingers dug into Dirk’s back, nails leaving dark moons of red and white as her breathing heightened, and Dirk was biting into her neck, sucking on pale flesh. He held himself up on one arm, the other playing with Roxy’s breast.

“Shit,” she moaned. He was hitting such a delightful little spot, and oh my god, that was too fantastic, and her cries were more like little yelps, and Dirk was chuckling against her skin, not stopping anything he was doing, and the blood was still dripping into her mouth, and she kept having to swallow it, and she licked at it, trying to hide it from the skin.

“Ah, babe, fuck.”

Dirk’s muscles tightened in his back, and Roxy scraped her nails down the flesh, skin cells bunching under the crescents of her nails.

There was something about lying in this hotel bed, with the plush pillows and a blanket tossed over Dirk’s lower body, that had Roxy feeling so different than any of the guys she’d fucked coming out of bars or scratched an itch with her own hand in her bed or on the couch. She had already been on edge, but this was a different kind of edge than the paranoid, skittish version that she was on.

This edge was sensual, delightful, blissful. There wasn’t any ignorance in this that she could find, and Roxy was scraping down Dirk’s back again, body offering itself to him in the best way possible, and Dirk continued up his friction, his pace, to keep up the speed and Roxy was practically writhing under him to get her body where it needed to be.


	7. Chapter 7

“Decent distraction?” Dirk asked afterwards, holding the blond close to him and stroking through her hair.

Roxy didn’t have an answer, her body still shaking in Dirk’s arms. Her skin was frozen, other than the area between her thighs and the places Dirk’s lips left large slathers of saliva and DNA samples. Her insides felt warm, and the juxtaposition wasn’t her favorite thing. Her mind was reacting terribly to the probing she had taken, but that was putting this romp in a bad context. 

“Well, are you at least warm?” he asked, searching for the blankets to pull around them.

“No,” she whispered, voice strained. 

“I – you don’t regret that, do you?”

Roxy shook her head from side to side, flinching as the onslaught of shadows focused in the corners of her eyes. Her face took refuge in the pillow next to Dirk’s head, and he wrapped himself closer around her, stroking her hair and rubbing the tight spot between her shoulder blades.

“Nothing can hurt you,” he assured, but Roxy found no truth in his words. Or at least there wasn’t belief that wrapped the words as they entered her ears. 

“I want a drink.”

“No. No you don’t need one.”

“Yes I do! Just – a beer or a glass of wine.”

“No.”

Roxy pulled away, taking much of the covers with you, and Dirk sighed, pulling her back and making her stay. Roxy squirmed in his arms, unable to get past the muscular bars of steel wrapped around her waist, and she was crying, unable to stop the salty water dripping off her face.

“You don’t need it,” Dirk repeated and Roxy shook her head. She did need it, she did. 

She needed the amber blood inside her mouth, tongue licking the mouth of the bottle, searching for every last drop of the fluid. She wanted an IV tube hooked to her veins that would secure a steady flow of the vodka that would flood her blood. Roxy desired the downing of martinis and the Long Island Iced Teas that would secure the flavor variant she oddly found herself having.

But there was a primal need to end the montage of screaming and sobbing, yelling and fighting, that scraped at her ear drums and the inside of her skull. Nails on a chalk board. Never-ending nails on a never-ending chalk board. She couldn’t take it.

“Let go of me,” she cried, still trying to kick her way out, to claw her way out and lock herself out of Dirk’s reach. He wasn’t hurting her, but the terrors were and she needed to be alone while she dealt with that.

Dirk released Roxy and she shot out of the bed, pulling away the top quilt as she did so before landing in the bathroom and slamming the door shut. Her fingers fumbled for a moment before locking it and she crawled into the bathtub, making a new bed there where she curled up and cried. 

She cried for the things they said, for the pounding of her heart, for Dirk. Dirk who was left there wondering why she had vaulted out of all reason after they had both finished off each other and he was only trying to cuddle her, to take care of her. But she didn’t deserve that, didn’t need to have the care of a single person in the world.

Roxy couldn’t breathe while the air was sucked out through her tears, and long, slender claws roped over her chest, ripping through the flesh and punching through her heart before making their way through her lungs, and giant gasping breaths returned air to them, but she shouldn’t be alive, shouldn’t be alive. This was too excruciating to be an alive thought. 

It was then Roxy first came up with the plan to kill herself.


	8. Chapter 8

The bass was pounding and breaking her ear drums. Bodies pressed around the girl, and she’d gotten lost from Dirk twenty minutes ago on her way to find the bar and get something to drink. They gave her a plastic cup of beer, and she had the thing sloshing in her stomach long before she’d gotten back to the pit area to squeeze her way through dancing bodies and flashes of skin she didn’t want to touch. 

Roxy lost hold of the red plastic cup she’d been squeezing as a man pushed her backwards, and her back came into contact with the wet ground. Wet with blood and sweat and tears and alcohol. 

The bodies surged around her as power chords were hit. The drum beat commanded her heart, but it was breaking out of its box and screaming, screaming, screaming, exploding in her chest, getting too tight for the confines of her rib cage. A scream clawed past her lips, but it meant nothing to the people coming closer and closer and closer to her on the ground, feet stamping, and where was Dirk? Why wasn’t he here?

A foot came down on her ankle, and something seemed to snap. The person didn’t even notice, but had stepped off, and Roxy couldn’t get up while her heart was pounding in her chest, leaping past her throat and into her mouth, where she was drowning on the taste of blood and fluids (there were none), and the tears were starting, adding another constriction to her throat along with the chords attached to the heart in her mouth.

She wanted to scream, wanted to cry out to be saved by someone, by Dirk, but her voice wouldn’t work. It had run away and gotten lost in the crowd only to be trampled to death by the stomping feet of the people and shattered by the guitar solo.

Roxy tried again, and this time a hoarse whisper exploded past her lips, and she felt hands on her arm, pulling her to her feet, and she looked around for her savior, but it was grimy man, leering at her, and his hands were at her waist, drifting, and Roxy pushed and pushed but nothing would stop it.

It was too loud, too tight. She couldn’t breathe, and it took a moment to realize, with the water hitting her lips, that Roxy was crying.

Another set of hands grabbed her, and there was a voice. A voice screaming and yelling but she couldn’t process the sound, and the man shouted back until he left. 

The other person turned her around, and Roxy caught a brief glimpse of Dirk’s face before being pressed against his chest. 

“We’re leaving!” he shouted over the blasting music. Bombs were dropping, exploding, detonating, as the drums continued on.

Roxy only nodded, not trusting herself to answer him, and not sure she could make a sound that could be heard over the roaring lion of a band. 

Dirk hesitated for only a moment before pulling Roxy out of the crowd, and her ankle didn't hurt that terribly, past the security that guarded the entrances to the pit, and into the murmur of the halls of the arena. Dirk’s hand slid into hers and squeezed, the other hand wiping the tears on Roxy’s face, but they persisted, continuing to fall down her cheeks, eyeliner and mascara running down her pale skin. The black came off with Dirk’s thumb, staining the skin of his fingerprint. 

Dirk stopped near the entrance and Roxy bumped into him, lost in the tears and the racing of her heart.

“Hey,” he whispered, turning to her and pulling her closer to him. The hand on her face stroked against Roxy’s cheekbone. “You’re okay. Nothing happened. Let’s go for a little drive. There’s someone I think you should talk to.”


	9. Chapter 9

“Where are we?”

Dirk had pulled up in front of an office building complex. Names fell off the walls, the letters dropping off the infrastructure and smashing against the ground, shattering into little cells of glittering glass. Roxy’s eyes followed him, her brain forgetting that she had even asked a question.

There were slight murmurs caressing her ears, licking at the skin.

“-that I want you to talk to.”

“Wha-“

“There’s a therapist here,” Dirk repeated, turning the keys and pulling them out of the ignition.

“I’m not crazy!”

**Shut up, bitch, yes you are.**

“No, you shut up!”

“Roxy?”

She blinked, head shaking lightly to clear the thoughts. What had happened?

“Who were you talking to just now?” Dirk placed a hand on her shoulder, thumb rubbing her shoulder blade.

Roxy blinked. Hadn’t Dirk – no of course he hadn’t heard it. And everyone else was right. There were those creatures crawling over her skin, dripping into the pores and then rolling out, her body completely soaked with insanity and vile monstrosity. Such a redundant term, but instead of contemplating that, she slipped herself out of the car, trying to breathe around the realization that without numbing herself with booze and pain she would always be crazy. 

Her feet were moving before Roxy registered the thought to run, and her stomach churned, riding a roller coaster. 

“Roxy!”

There were arms around her waist, and she slammed forward, still trying to move, move, move, but she couldn’t, and Dirk was brushing her hair, turning her around and picking her up.

“Let me go!”

“Roxy, no. We have to go see the therapist.”

Roxy pounded against Dirk’s back, but he kept his arms wrapped securely around her, putting the kicking girl over his shoulder as he walked up the steps to the lobby of the office building. 

“Why do you do this, Dirk? Why won’t you let me drink, why are you bringing me somewhere I don’t want to be in?”

He took her into the elevator, and Roxy slid off his shoulder, onto her feet where she rubbed her eyes, shoulder slumped over, feeling like a sad lost and –

**Crazy**

lonely little girl.

Dirk was staring at her, removed his shades, and ice shards stabbed into her heart, breaking off the points as they were twisted. Then, plastic knives, sharpened to a point, came through after the ice picks of pain and they were gouged into the beating organ and Roxy backed away from him, pressing herself into the corner.

“I-”

Nothing she could say could fix the look of disappointment on his face, and this was further evidence to state in the case that was for her suicide. Roxy’s lower lip quivered, and she looked away, unable to take the gaze on her lover’s face.

The doors opened with that little, cheery ding and Dirk hid his eyes again as Roxy, stricken, stayed where she was, barely able to support her body weight. She was stunned with just how much she’d seemed to have hurt him. She’d fallen off so many wagons, like the time she promised to stop drinking, but there were all those voices – so many voices – and that man that kept showing up when she shut her eyes, and she had to drink after a week, and he’d been saddened by her failure, but this was a thousand times worse. 

Like there were stars a thousand times larger than the sun. People with thousands of more dollars than her. Millions. Billions. She had no money, but all the cash in the world couldn’t make up for the look Dirk had just given her, and he was out of the elevator, his back to her, and Roxy was on her knees in the elevator. The doors were closing, and she bowed her head, arms over her and she was rocking, rocking, rocking, until hands were on her back, pulling her to her feet.

“Get off me,” she screamed, trying to throw the hands off her arm, but she had no power against the hands, those strong, firm hands. Hands that weren’t Dirks.

Roxy looked up to find a slightly older man, maybe his mid-thirties, dark hair and light eyes. He wasn’t Dirk, but Roxy’s words fell in the ocean of air around them, and she blinked at him. 

“Please don’t touch me.”

“Sorry. You’re Miss Lalonde, correct?”

She only nodded.

“Right. Well, I’m Dr. Rosenburg, and your friend Dirk made this appointment. Normally, I wouldn’t take those, but he said you’re in a real state of work.”

Great. And Dirk was calling her crazy, and now this man thought she was crazy. She wasn’t fucking crazy, but apparently not knowing how to handle crowds was an automatic A+ on the crazy test.

“This isn’t even the scheduled appointment he made, but he texted me earlier, when you were going to the merchandise stan-”

“Beer. I was a getting a beer.”

Rosenburg looked the slightest bit surprised, but he only gave a slight nod, perhaps only to himself, and he led her by a gentle hand cupped around her elbow into his office. Dirk wouldn’t meet her eyes, and then the door was shut behind them, and he was cut off from her.

“He said you weren’t doing well. Would you like to tell me why he would say that?”

Roxy stood by the door as the doctor took a seat in a plush leather chair. There was a couch and another chair she could choose to sit on, but she only stood, the tears dripping down her face like a leaking faucet. 

“Because I’m fucked up.”

“Roxy, no one is, as you say, fucked up. We’re all just different. Can you fill out a few forms for me?”

“No. Because I’m not doing this.”

Roxy turned to leave, hand gripping around the doorknob, and she was turning it when Rosenburg spoke up again.

“He said you hear voices.”

The door shut, almost a slam, and she whirled around to face him again.

“I am not crazy.”

“Of course you aren’t.”

He wasn’t condescending, but Roxy didn’t trust it. Her eyes narrowed. 

“I don’t need to be here.”

“But you want to be?”

“No.”

“Roxy, if you can’t admit that something’s wrong, then we can’t help you. That’s what Dirk and I want to do – help. You deserve to get better.”

“There’s nothing wrong with me!”

“He said you see things that aren’t there, will scream in the middle of the night, drink until you pass out, rinse and repeat.”

Roxy slid down the door. How could she have thought to trust the asshole when he spilled this at the drop of a phone call to a stranger? She had never even told him (or Jane or Jake) that all this shit was wrong with her. And yet Dirk knew. Dirk seemed to know it all, or maybe he was hearing the same thing. That had to be it.

**Don’t be ridiculous.**

No, she knew better than to think that Dirk could remotely understand anything she was going through, or that he could hear the same –

**crazy**

\- voices going on in her head.

“He’s right.” Roxy in no way desired to admit this, but she was. Might as well. He already knew her deepest secrets (other than planning a way to kill herself), but she didn’t want to share these things.

“Are they constant?”

“Unless I’m drinking. But then they’re quieter, so I guess so. Yeah.”

The doctor nodded, writing down something on his papers.

That was how their session went, and Roxy felt probed, stripped naked of her outer shell and exposed for the whole world to see. He had scrubbed her completely raw of her armor, and her mind tingled, the hands searching for a way to cover the private parts.

He gave her a word to contemplate. Schizophrenia. The name to her ‘disease.’ Of course she was sick. How could she not be? But Roxy knew that. She knew she was ill of the brain and of the body and of the soul. 

The ride back to the hotel was silent and Roxy was pressed up against the door, arms wrapped around her legs. She had a new reality to deal with. But, once she thought about it, it wasn’t new. It just had a name. Nothing had changed, except the betrayal that had painted her skin and the drops of anger that exploded with acid burns against her innards. 

“How’d it go?”

“Fuck you.”

“Roxy,” Dirk sighed, but she felt no shame in making the sound so desperate or upset. Fuck Dirk Strider. 

“Go to hell.” 

“I wanted to try to get you some help that you don’t know how to get.”

“I was fine getting my help from a bottle!”

“You were going to drink yourself to death!” he shouted back, pulling into a parking slot that licked at the edges of the hotel’s entrance.

“Fuck you if you think I needed any of this.”

“Well, you already did fuck me, Roxy. Or was that just a mistake that I made and now you’re pissed so you’re going to go off and cry rape at the drop of a hat?”

A shaking fist knocked Dirk in the side of the arm, but the male barely flinched, only looking remotely surprised that she had hit him. Roxy flung herself from the car, running and running and running without paying attention to where she was going.

“You already tried this!”

“Fuck you.”

Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you. Turning into a broken record was something Roxy didn’t give a remote fuck about. She was too angry, and as she charged into the street, feet marking the pavement with a dusty shoe print, there was a car that kissed her hip.


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I admit this is a bit of a filler chapter, for which I apologize, my darlings.

They fed her little candy pills, but they didn’t taste good. If you left them in your mouth too long, they’d make you want to throw up, but the other they yanked your tongue around and made sure you swallowed. ‘Don’t be the thorn in our side’ they’d say, and there was a compulsion to obey.

The little pills were swallowed by a shot of water.

_Would taste better as vodka._

Yes, but they mandated sobriety. Which was simply quite ridiculous as if half the addicts in here were allowed their drug or drink of choice, then they’d only have half the patients to feet, bathe, medicate, and clothe. Plus, their on-staff psychiatrists would have half the patients. 

Roxy’s tongue was ripped from its cavern and the little technician grinned at her.

“You’re getting better at this, Lalonde.”

She had no smooth rebuttal, no sarcastic reply. Lethargy filled her veins, and she could say nothing against it. 

The voices had died, but so had she.

Instead, a black hole sucked away the fervor of personality, of fight. Even the desperation had taken its leave, vacating her traits. She was lost in a sea of void disclosure with an emptiness. A hollowness.

Her wounds had been treated, and for more time than she could count, Roxy had been bedridden due to her hip being shattered when she was hit by a car, and they sent her here, and she still was unable to put together the pieces of how she had gotten here.

White white and more white. Bright lights and needles. But the needles only hurt and then she drifted out. Everything was too quiet when she came to, even the riot in her head was a deserted wasteland of dead bodies, Roxy left walking through an empty field with her hands in her pockets. Toes poking at the bodies and the bodies rolling, rolling, rolling down a hill and she was left there, alone on the bald head of her brain.

“Lalonde, move.”

“Wha-?”

There was a hand against her back, and she was moving without wanting to, but her feet complied, following orders. 

Roxy stumbled, and she blinked hard as she jolted forward, but then her feet were walking, normal as a butterfly, and she made her way into the common room and flumped into a chair, staring off at the wall.

The room was so silent, without the murmur of choir voices, of the prisoners of war. There was nothing keeping her grounded, and this was year three. But to Roxy, the days blurred together, a mess of white and pills and doctors and patients. It took six months for them to decide she wasn’t a flight risk, and let her go outside, sit in the gardens. But she hadn’t seen Dirk since she was checked in. She’d tried to call, left countless messages, wrote him letters – her handwriting was skewed by the pills in her system, pills she didn’t know the name of – but Dirk seemed to pretend she wasn’t real. 

And maybe Roxy wasn’t real. She existed only in this asylum, this institute, and without the alcohol and the pain and the screams in her mind, none of it felt like it was tangible. This life in this hellhole was demented, and today was the day she met with the new psychiatrist. 

“Lalonde, what are you doing?”

“Sitting.” One word responses felt necessary as nothing else could make sense to her. Her head shifted around, swiveling on her neck, to focus – barely – on the little assistant standing there.

“You have an appointment to make.”

He gripped her arm and pulled her to her feet, but Roxy only let her eyes fall shut, mind drifting off to another place. It wasn’t real, she wasn’t real. There were no voices. She wasn’t real.


	11. Chapter 11

The mirror showed bruises. Bruises upon deadly bruises that ached with movement and with any sort of pressure. Her body screamed, and Roxy’s thin and pale body was lost amongst the colorful array of busted blood vessels that had sprayed their life against the underside of skin cells. 

His plan was to beat the crazy out of her. Beat her until she didn’t hear the voices anymore. It left her with a thin, livid body. It left her with only a sense of feeling. There weren't emotions, just a numb shell that didn't fit inside this asylum.

Horror stories had been told about nightmare institutions that experimented on their patients until they died. They were starved and beaten and viewed as monsters. They were lobotomized and forced through electroshock therapy. It didn’t heal them.

But Roxy’s new therapist seemed lost in the past where physical punishment was the answer and reforms never took place. He struck her repeatedly and locked her inside the padded room – the room where the patients were forgotten and lost for weeks at a time and if/when they came out, they were thin as bones, if they weren’t bones already.

“Lalonde!”

Roxy flinched away from the cracked mirror, covering her naked body with her arms and hands. Turning to face the voice of her caller, she found one of the nurses, glaring sharply at her.

“What have you been told about missing your pills?” she shrieked, and Roxy shrugged, moving around her to get back into the hospital garb. 

“Something about them making me normal,” the blond answered, slipping back into the bra and underwear, pants and shirt. She really wasn’t that compelled to care about the stupid pills that forced the voices to reject her. The only one she didn’t miss was Threat.

“Well, if you were to actually keep at them, you would have been out of here over a year ago,” the nurse informed her. 

This information was probably supposed to elude Roxy for her entire life, but now that she had it…she needed to start a plan to get the fuck out of Dodge. Her ears perked up, like the mutt she was, and the blond suppressed a smirk. Though that only reminded her of Dirk, and she got bitter all over again.

“You’ll see me this evening,” Roxy replied, mocking a curtsy and brushing past the nurse to exit into the hall, but this only brought on further pain to her shoulders. 

As she made her way down the hall, she didn’t take much notice of the patients and the nurses, the orderlies and the doctors. The only object that managed to capture her downcast gaze and planning mind was the visiting room. Her fingers grazed over the wall, along the entirely smooth surface, until they came to the window frame leading into that room, where the mucus-sucking patients held the closest semblance of a conversation with their family.

Except there was John, that man that swore he could fly, and had jumped off so many buildings that they finally dropped him into this hellhole, that carried on and on and on with the least meaningful dribble about how he wasn’t gay ad that he shouldn’t be in here. Well, the dolt might possibly be right. Perhaps he shouldn’t be. Perhaps he should have killed himself on one of his flights.

Those black thoughts were taking over her mind, and her chest cavity was emptied of her heart, her lungs, her soul, so Roxy lingered at the door, forehead pressed against the glass and watched them. Longing for Dirk, the patient soon found her eyes welling with tears.

“Lalonde, what are you doing?”

She glanced ever so slightly to her right, caught the shape of an orderly standing there, and shifted her head back to viewing the patients and families and friends correspond with each other.

“Lalonde!” 

“Just let me look,” she grumbled, breath clouding the glass. Leaning back, Roxy used the hem of her shirt to wipe away the fog before leaning back in, cool window calming her heating face.

Hands gripped her shoulders and she was soon toted off to her room. The voices licked upon her brain, but only fleeting wisps of minute whispers came to half-formation. As he dropped her upon her bed, Roxy had drifted off in a self-induced shut down. One word continued to float across Roxy’s mind, but she could not pick out if the whispers came from mental creations or her own, slightly-hazy, free will. Either way, Roxy was content to die. Either in this hell, or out in the real world.

One way, or another, she was getting out of here. Whether that was in a body bag or a car, as she watched the trees turn to city.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wow okay, you would not believe how busy and insane my life has been. I have been working on a single chapter for months now, and I never forgot this, I just never had time, but now that it's out, it shouldn't be that long between chapters now. I'm so sorry, lovelies! But I'm back now! (And yes, I know this chapter is shit).


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